A widespread outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, beginning around 5:20 AM ET and resolved by 9:30 AM ET, brought down thousands of websites and services, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and many other popular platforms.
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The disruption began around 5:20 AM ET when Cloudflare detected unusual traffic patterns. The company, which provides network and security services for about 20% of the web, experienced a configuration file that grew beyond expected size and triggered a crash in the software system handling traffic.
Users across the globe began reporting issues shortly after 11:30 GMT, with DownDetector showing more than 10,000 user reports related to Cloudflare services. The outage monitoring site itself was briefly affected by the disruption.
Among the affected services were X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Shopify, Indeed, Claude AI, Truth Social, Zoom, and numerous other websites that rely on Cloudflare's infrastructure for security and content delivery.
Cloudflare said the outage was resolved and services would return to normal, though some users might still experience brief degradation. The company apologized to customers and stated it would learn from the incident to improve reliability.
This outage comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a major disruption, highlighting the fragility of modern internet infrastructure and the widespread impact when key service providers experience technical issues.
